national teams, held in Japan and South Korea between 31 May and 30 June 2002. The national teams of Japan and South Korea qualified for the finals automatically as tournament hosts, as did France as the winners of the previous World Cup in 1998. The remaining 29 spots were decided through qualifying rounds held between March 2000 and November 2001, organised by the six FIFA confederations and involving 193 teams. In the finals, the teams were divided into eight groups of four with each team playing each other once in a round-robin format. The two top teams from each group advanced to a knock-out stage. World Cup holders France were eliminated in the group stage in 2002, losing games against Senegal and Denmark as they finished bottom of Group A. The game was played at the International Stadium in Yokohama, where three other matches in the World Cup were previously held. The stadium was the largest in the tournament as well as the largest in Japan, seating over 70,000 spectators. The aggregate attendance across all World Cup matches at the stadium was 260,000. The match ball for this game was the Adidas Fevernova, which was specifically made for the World Cup. Its design was different from the normal "Tango" type of three-pointed shapes connecting each hexagon, instead introducing a different, triangle-like shape on four hexagons. This look and colour usage was based on Asian culture. It was manufactured using a syntactic foam layer and Adidas said should give the ball a "more precise and predictable flight path". Adidas said the ball was smaller and heavier than the average permitted circumference and weight, but several players criticised it for being too large and too light. Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon called the ball "a ridiculous kiddy's bouncing ball," while Brazil's Edílson criticised the ball as being "too big and too light". This was the last World Cup final in which the same kind of ball was used for every game, as a tradition that continues to the present was started in 2006 where a ball with the same technical specifics but a different color and name was used in the final and, in some cases, the semi-finals and third-place match. In the previous World Cup in 1998, Germany had reached the quarter-final stage, in which they were eliminated by Croatia. The team suffered several injuries prior to the 2002 World Cup finals